Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies’ AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent.
The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Francisco, California, alleges the two businesses ignored the legal means of obtaining data for their AI models and chose to gather it without paying for it.
“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” the complaint says. “They systematically scraped 300 billion words from the internet, ‘books, articles, websites and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.’ OpenAI did so in secret, and without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law.”
Edit: uh, wrong thread… I don’t know if I should delete this, but I’ll strike it out for now…
You know, thinking about it… The only Google service I really use personally is YouTube without logging in and with ad block. My work email is through gmail, and I have some gmail accounts that I haven’t killed, but I self host my email now… I don’t have an android phone, and I use DuckDuckGo… My browser is Firefox. I haven’t really gone out of my way to remove Google intentionally, it’s just sort of happened gradually and has been a death by a thousand cuts. I used to have a Pixel, but I got fed up with the lack of long term support on Android devices and they’d always die on me… I used to have Google Fi for my phone plan, but it was just more expensive and the support wasn’t great… honestly any Google product has terrible customer support because they kind of build things hoping you’ll never have to talk to a human.I’m a bit confused, Google sucks but this article is about MS and OpenAI. Did you comment on the wrong post?
YEP I DID. This was meant to be on the post about degoogling… I feel like I keep having a problem with Lemmy where I end up on the wrong post when I click? It’s super weird… Am I the only one that ends up on the weird sports post all the time when I didn’t go there?
Yeah, having the post swap to a different one while you’re commenting is a known Lemmy bug.
Okay. I will feel less shame… I could have sworn I was on the right thread… I clicked on it, check the post, checked the image… but I guess it took me a while to write the comment and they pulled the old switcharoo on me. I thought I was going insane.
I wonder if this will go differently from Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. ChatGPT likely qualifies as “transformative”, but I’m uncertain if it qualifies as a “public service” or not given that it has a paid tier. How privacy/personal information ties into this should also be interesting.
